Games I'm not overly bothered about (cba with new games, really), but would like to noodle around on older things like Mafia 2, Metro 2033 and whatever else is lying around my Steam account, though if it can't even handle them then I won't particularly cry about it.

Gonna be used mostly for photoshopping and HD video stuffs. Guessing the larger RAM would be better, but so out of touch with modern processors and GPUs I couldn't say.

Yeah, I figured I could upgrade the RAM in the other one, but still. Cheaper = better.

It's mostly that I haven't kept up to date with modern processors or graphics cards, so don't have the slightest clue whether a 4455M is radically faster than a 3400M or just vaguely quicker. I miss the days when it was simply "Pentium + clockspeed = good".

Neither graphics card is going to be able to play anything particularly well, but they're about the same level. CPU doesn't count for much really, which puts it down to the ram. 8gb = not having to bother upgrading it, so go with that one.

Cheers. I figured the processors and whatnot were much of a muchness, but didn't want to just assume that and end up with something ridiculously crappy, and the benchmark sites I've found seemed to vary so much - mostly because they do it on the CPU or GPU alone and don't seem to take any other configuration into account, making it mostly meaningless to me.

Buuuut all that said, someone else has pointed me towards a slightly cheaper laptop with far superior specs which has proper reviews for it and everything. Even runs Skyrim well on medium (not that I give a fuck about Skyrim, but nice to know). Huzzah! Thanks anyway. xxxxx